Donnie Wahlberg continues the Blue Bloods saga in his real-life hometown for spinoff Boston Blue
When CBS announced they were cancelling Blue Bloods after 14 successful seasons, the decision was met with shock and outrage. After all, the show’s ratings remained high, with a loyal fanbase tuning in each Friday night to follow the ongoing saga of the Reagans — a New York City family who all worked in law enforcement. CBS president Amy Reisenbach confirmed that ratings were not a factor in the decision, but that the show’s high production costs were; however, she insisted the network’s goal was to “refresh the schedule” by shedding a show that had been on the air a decade-and-a-half.
Stars Donnie Wahlberg and Tom Selleck were reportedly blindsided, each having agreed to take a 25 per cent pay cut so the series could continue. Fans launched a campaign to save it, and while there were discussions of Blue Bloods being picked up by another network or streaming service, those talks never bore fruit.
Then, two months after the final episode of Blue Bloods aired, CBS announced plans for a spinoff, Boston Blue, in which Wahlberg would reprise the role of NYPD detective Danny Reagan, who relocates to Boston to take on a new role with the Beantown police department. He’s partnered with a Boston detective, Lena Silver (Star Trek: Discovery’s Sonequa Martin-Green), who also comes from a family cops, as “the eldest daughter of a prominent law enforcement family,” per CBS. In addition to Lena, the Silver family is comprised of district attorney Mae Silver (Gloria Reuben), police superintendent Sarah Silver (Maggie Lawson), rookie cop Jonah Silver (Marcus Scribner) and renowned Baptist pastor Reverend Edwin Peters (Ernie Hudson). Meanwhile, as Danny settles into his new home, he also hopes to reconnect with his son Sean (Mika Amonsen), who is beginning his own career in Boston.
“One of the things I knew coming into the show was we had to build a family, and a cast that could survive without Danny Reagan being in Boston,” says Wahlberg. “And I think we’ve successfully done that. It’s one of the great things about our show right now, is this world where Danny’s come into, and he’s become part of the world. It’s not like Danny with his backpack and it’s all about what he’s pulling out of his backpack. He’s had to become part of this new place and this new family. Onscreen, it gives us so many more stories to tell and gives us a really rich new ground to cover.”
For Wahlberg, there’s a practical reason behind a spinoff that introduces all these new characters and storylines instead of becoming The Danny Reagan Show: his other job, as member of middle-aged boy band New Kids on the Block, which continues to tour and has recently had the dates of its Las Vegas residency extended. “I’ve done this for a decade-and-a-half when I was filming Blue Bloods, touring every summer and filming the other nine months of the year, and that oftentimes would overlap,” he explains. “Of course, it was different, because we had an established cast and all these different things. But I think in a similar way, we are at a point now where this show can stand on its own. I’m not missing episodes or missing scenes and stuff like that when I go off to do the New Kids residency . . . I know, like, if Sonequa’s gotta go in and chase a few bad guys without me for a few days, it’s gonna be great, and there’s gonna be storylines that she can do with her family to shift my days to be able to film the stuff I have to shoot when I’m in town. I know it’s going to be great. It’s such a great cast, and so many new stories we get to tell, that it really isn’t a problem. It’s probably a little exhausting, but I would never complain about it. It’s literally what I’ve worked for my whole life, to be able to perform and do concerts and to act and have a show that’s successful and on the air. I’m so blessed and so grateful that to even see it as any form of burden would be criminal, and my dad would come down from heaven and kick me right up the butt if I ever complained . . .”
As Martin-Green points out, it’s her character’s relationship with her family that provides the series’ emotional backbone, just as the relationship with the Reagans did on Blue Bloods. “At the centre of these shows, it is about the heart of the character and the heart of the family . . . it’s multilayered connections, right? Because you’re seeing people on the job saving the day, sacrificing everything that they have for the greater good. But there’s all this connected tissue between them that they’re having to deal with as well. And so, I think seeing people doing that while also relating to each other in these ways, it’s kind of intoxicating.”
According to Wahlberg, that focus on family is a direct continuation — and, frankly, something that fans of the original show would understandably expect in the spinoff. “I’m going to quote Tom Selleck, who said this so eloquently so many years ago on Blue Bloods and I think we’ve all done a good job of carrying this forward in our shows,” Wahlberg muses. “He said, ‘The jeopardy in a show like this is not whether we’re going to catch the bad guy or not, right? We know who the characters are. They’re not going anywhere. It’s whether or not that fight at dinner, that fight after dinner, that disagreement between partners is going to go one step beyond irreparable.’ You know whatI mean? That’s the real jeopardy. Did Danny say too much to Lena this week? Lena and Mae’s argument, are they going to be able to fix it? There’s a family secret that’s been revealed that no one knew about. The jeopardy is, are we going to be able to make up at the end of the day? Not the crime stuff. In that context, I think it’s why these shows are successful, because the jeopardy is in the right place . . . the real jeopardy every week, in scene to scene, is in the relationships. Because we put family first at the centre of these shows, that’s where the jeopardy must live.”
Boston Blue airs Fridays on CTV & CBS